In this third Neapolitan novel, Elena and Lila, the two girls whom readers first met in My Brilliant Friend, have become women.

Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works as a common laborer.

Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons.

Both women have attempted are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up during the nineteen-seventies. Yet they are still very much bound to each other by a strong, unbreakable bond.